SOURCE: “I Henry VI” and “2 & 3 Henry VI,” in These Valiant Dead: Renewing the Past in Shakespeare's Histories, University of Iowa Press, 1991, pp. 1-30.

In the essays below, Jones presents an overview of the three parts of Henry VI, particularly emphasizing Shakespeare's use of history in the plays.

The first play of the first tetralogy begins with the most plaintive and extended lament for a lost leader that we will encounter through the entire series of English history plays. Bedford's opening lines intensify the solemnity of Henry V's funeral procession by sounding the enormity of both the loss and its consequences:

Hung be the heavens with black, yield day to night! Comets, importing change of times and states, Brandish your crystal tresses in the sky And with them scourge the bad revolting stars That have consented unto Henry's death— King Henry the Fifth, too famous to live long! England...